Free The Novice by Thich Nhat Hanh Page B

because the owner of the property did not consent to their presence. Right away the monastics sought to prove to local as well as national authorities that their presence was legitimate, showing them all the receipts for the funds our donors had given for the construction of each building. Nevertheless for fourteen months the monks and nuns of Bat Nha Monastery were continually and increasingly harassed.
    For the whole month of September 2008, policemen came to the residences from seven to eleven o’clock every night to question and harass the nuns and monks, the vast majority of whom were under thirty years old. Following the extraordinary living example of kindness given by their teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, our young nuns and monks would exclaim:
    â€œOh, poor uncle-policemen, because of us you have to work so hard until midnight to investigate. Sisters, brothers, show them your legal papers first, and then let us sing a song for our uncle-policemen.”
    â€œPlease prepare some tea for our uncle-policemen!”
    â€œShall we take a souvenir photo with our uncles?”
    After a month of unsuccessful attempts to intimidate our monastics with these nightly visits, this particular practice was abandoned.
    The authorities then set up several loudspeakers that blasted insults at the residences twenty-four hours a day. Buses of lay friends who arrived for days of mindfulness practice at the monastery were refused entry by police, and bus owners were threatened. (Our friends found ways to climb the walls to get in to practice with us anyway!) The monastics were then forcibly evicted from one building after another and their belongings literally thrown out of their rooms, often into the rain. These 379 young persons squeezed themselves into smaller and smaller places, but still kept on quietly practicing together to cultivate their mindfulness and their spiritual life.
    Their electricity and water supplies were cruelly cut off from June to September 2009. One day during that time, a delegation of venerable monks and nuns from Saigon who came to visit were beaten and pelted with excrement by a mob. On that same day a young woman dressed very provocatively was sent to taunt the monks sitting in meditation. When she came into the meditation hall, she was so struck, so impressed, by their energy, she didn’t know what to do. An old woman, presumably a leader of the mob, pushed the young woman and demanded, “Why are you just sitting there silently? Say something!” At that moment the monks began their chanting practice, and the young woman burst into tears. After receiving two calls on her cell phone, she left the room.
    The monks and nuns endured it all with compassion, thanks to the support of local people who secretly brought thousands of bottles of mineral water each night between one and two a.m. when the policemen were asleep. The skies also sent water, raining down every night into the monastics’ collecting containers.
    Finally on September 26–27, 2009, the police sent a violent hired mob of two hundred to provoke the monastics in the ugliest possible ways. They planted condoms and sex books in monks’ belongings, yelled at them, and dragged them from their rooms in an effort to load them into thirty taxicabs and four trucks rented specially for the occasion. The monks linked their arms together in circles to resist being thrown into the vehicles. Then the females of the mob actually sank so low as to squeeze the monks’ genitals. This finally forced the monks to release their locked arms, whereupon they were immediately stuffed into the taxicabs.
    Even as the mob dragged them down several sets of stairs from the fourth floor to ground level, beat them, and stuffed them into the cars, these young people—among them a boxing champion from Dak Lak Province— still refrained from fighting back or harming either the thugs or the policemen (who were supposedly absent and unaware of